Revels Takes Seat: First Black Senator Sworn In

Hiram Rhodes Revels took the oath of office as United States Senator from Mississippi on February 25, 1870, and in doing so occupied the very seat that Jefferson Davis had vacated when Mississippi seceded nine years earlier. The symbolism was staggering: a Black man, born free in North Carolina, representing a state that had fought a war to preserve slavery, sitting in the chamber where the Confederacy's president had once legislated. Revels was an unlikely revolutionary. An ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, he had spent the Civil War recruiting Black soldiers for the Union Army and serving as a chaplain. After the war, he settled in Natchez, Mississippi, entered local politics, and was elected to the state senate in 1869. When the Mississippi legislature needed to fill an unexpired U.S. Senate term, they chose Revels on the strength of his moderate temperament and oratorical skills. His swearing-in was contested for two days. Democratic senators argued that Revels could not be seated because the Dred Scott decision of 1857 had ruled that Black people were not citizens, and therefore Revels had not been a citizen for the nine years required by the Constitution. Republican Senator Charles Sumner demolished this argument by pointing out that the Fourteenth Amendment had overturned Dred Scott and that Revels had been a free man his entire life. The Senate voted 48-8 to seat him. Revels served just over a year, advocating for the reinstatement of Black legislators expelled in Georgia and opposing racial segregation in federal workplaces. He was not radical enough for some Black leaders and too radical for most white Mississippians. After leaving the Senate, he became the first president of Alcorn University, the nation's first land-grant college for Black students. His brief tenure proved that Black political participation was possible; the century of disenfranchisement that followed proved how fragile that possibility was.